Mother rain, manifold, measureless,falling on fallow, on field and forest,on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,downwelling waters all-washing, widerthan cities, softer than sisterhood, vasterthan countrysides, calming, recalling:return to us, teaching our troubledsouls in your ceaseless descentto fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the seas.
Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good
June would not be June without clay pots and cauldrons and planters of red geraniums (cranesbills) blooming on the thresholds of houses in the village, and today is the third day of the quintessential summer month. How can it be? The season has just arrived, but the midsummer solstice is only three weeks away.
Beau and I have noticed on early morning walks that many of this year's geranium offerings are accompanied by purple petunias and marigolds. There are also some splendid coleuses in rainbow shades, and sometimes all four dwell comfortably in the same pot, geraniums, petunias, marigold and coleus. What a riot of aestival color!
My gypsy soul craves coleus strains like "Dragon Heart, "Rainbow Dragon", "Kingswood Torch" and "Chocolate Covered Cherry", and I am looking for other places in the garden to plant them this year. Ditto some of the arty amaranth varieties in local nurseries like "Joseph's Coat", "Molten Fire" and "Early Splendor". Whatever I add this time around, it has to be something the little bee sisters and the hummers will love.
A pot of geraniums on the threshold of the little blue house is a long standing summer tradition. Every year, I remember the specimens that graced the threshold in past years, welcoming everyone who came to the red (Benjamin Moore 2080-10 Raspberry Truffle) front door. I remember their shape, their color, their texture, their green and rather peppery fragrance, their jubilant, unfettered flowering.
May there be geraniums at your door too. May there be blooming in your life.
There is no mystery in this association of woods and other worlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a stream bed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.
Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places
This morning's sumptuous blooms are named for the goddess of the rainbow, Iris, messenger of the gods on Mount Olympus. She was charged with carrying their messages along the rainbow bridge between heaven and earth.
Iris also escorted the souls of virtuous dead women to their final resting places in the Elysian fields. In Greece, irises were planted on graves by grieving family members, that the goddess might recognize and guide their departed loved ones home.
Purple is one of my favourite colours, and when bearded irises bloom, they make my heart glad. That is surely what gardens and flowers are all about. A rainbow is a happy thing, and the flower's association with it seems appropriate.
Typing this, I remembered a silky, deep purple ribbon I wore in my hair as a child. The adults in my family thought the colour was not appropriate for someone so young, but I wore it anyway. It seems my love of purple goes back a very long way.
And so it goes . . . One day, the old crabapple is bare and forlorn, the next day it wears a multitude of tiny leaves. Almost overnight, the tree is covered with blooms and buzzing with throngs of ecstatic, blissed-out bumbles, bees and wasps.
Along comes an early summer breeze, and the crabapple symphony is over, petals drifting through the air like confetti, coming to rest on lawns and hedges and gardens, on fences and birdbaths and pergolas and fountains. The fallen bits of pink float merrily on puddles in the street and flutter across cobblestones in the village like tiny, airborne scraps of vibrantly hued carnival paper. Their presence conveys a festive aspect to the day, and seeing them on our morning walks makes us smile.
Our word traces its roots all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *swād- meaning sweet or pleasant, also the likely source of Old English, Germanic, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin words meaning the same thing.
Lilacs in the village are blooming, and when I stepped outside with Beau last evening around ten, the night air was full of their heady fragrance. For a few minutes, we leaned against the railing on the veranda and breathed in the glorious perfume. Then we were driven indoors by clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. The little blighters were out for blood and no mistake.
Standing out in the darkness, I remembered a long ago garden I planted with purple heliotrope. The color of the blooms was gorgeous, and their sweet, cherry-like scent pulled in hummingbirds, butterflies, bumbles and bees from miles around. The stuff was almost indecently sumptuous, and I shall have to plant it again.
How sweet this season is, how fleeting and poignant, just a little sad too. I sometimes wish that summer lasted a little longer this far north, but if it did, spring and autumn would be truncated slightly. No to that!
Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.
Mary Oliver
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Red is the color of new maple leaves on the old trees in the garden, the cardinals who visit my feeders, the koi in a nearby pond, the gently swaying birdhouses in a sunlight dappled yard not far from home.
Mike and Christa passed away a while ago, but their red bird houses remain, and I think of my old friends whenever I pass by. So many conversations when I was walking Beau or Spencer or Cassie. So many spirited exchanges about hawks visiting their yard, squirrels stealing their saffron crocus bulbs, the nut yield from their walnut tree. They grew some of the most towering, impressive sunflowers I have ever seen anywhere, and the webs spun by orb weaving spiders in their hedge were often several feet across. There was lots of stuff to talk about when we met, and I miss them.
One of these days, all that will remain of us (Beau and I) is the conversations we had on our morning rambles, all the happy natter about birds, bugs, varmints, weeds and village yard sales. There are worse ways to be remembered.
Sometimes I do the talking. Other times, the camera takes over, and the images it captures prefer to speak for themselves. This was one of those mornings, and I should have bowed to my lens and moved to the edge of the scene. What on earth can I possibly say about the dandelions in my garden?
Weeds they may be, but bees love dandelions, and that is enough for me. Running the mower over these golden wonders would be heartless, and I keep putting it off. For heaven's sake, the little dears are asters. What would the bees think?
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
Oliver Sacks, Gratitude
Earth is a good word for pondering in this shaggy season as we work in our gardens and tend the sweet beginnings of the harvest to come. All things, or at least most things, arise from the earth and return to it in time, us included.
Our word dates from before 950 CE, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; German erde, Old Norse jǫrth, and Gothic airtha, thence the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil or dwelling place. Then there is the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over. In the beginning is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *h₁er- meaning ground, soil, land or place.
When we say "earth", we are usually thinking of the ground under our feet. We may also be thinking of the many millions of roots doing their thing way down deep, of the bones of our little blue planet and the fiery heart beating in its molten core. We almost never think of ourselves as elements in the same story, but blood and bones, root and branch, rivers and rocks, we are all tiny, thoughtless players in a vast elemental process. Endlessly befuddled strands in the web, we are always getting distracted and forgetting that we are part of anything at all.
Once in a while, the simple fact that we are NOT separate shows up and insists we pay attention. It can happen while dangling on a rock face or seated in a pool of sunlight under a tree in the woods, on a hill somewhere under the summer stars, or on the shore of a favorite lake at dusk. Dazzling sunsets and starry nights do it for me every time, and occasionally it even happens while I am parked in the waiting room of my local cancer clinic. Such moments cannot be predicted, and nor should they, but I have noticed that they often show up right when I need them.
There I was this week, feet planted in the garden and head in the clouds, but not a lofty thought in sight. My soulmate and I gardened together fifty years, and I was missing him more than words can say that morning. Out of the blue, there came a fey scrap of elemental knowing, and I remembered (probably for the millionth time in this long and tatterdemalion life) that I was right where I was supposed to be and doing just what I was meant to be doing. I needed the reminder.
We belong here, roots, branches, star stuff and every dancing particle - we belong here as much as rivers, mountains, acorns, wild salmon and sandpipers do. Dirt, clouds, sky and stardust, it's all good.
May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness—
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees
dive into them and I too, to gather
their spiritual honey. Mute and meek,
yet theirs is the deepest certainty that
this existence too—this sense of
well-being, the flourishing of the
physical body—rides near the hub
of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good as a poem
or a prayer, can also make luminous
any dark place on earth.
Mary Oliver
Thank you to my friend Frances at Beautiful Strangers for reacquainting me with Mary's exquisite poem.
She appears in the woods a little later than her more vibrantly coloured red cousins, but she is just as grand with her three lush white petals, golden heart and three supporting bracts. Her petals are velvety, a little wider than those of the red trillium and they curve delightfully, as if she is trying to compensate for her lack of scarlet pigmentation with a paler but more shapely grandeur.
No compensation needed. She is absolutely gorgeous in her own right, another of the northern wildflowers that Georgia O'Keefe would have loved to paint.
Looking at the heavens places me in time and space - and beyond them. Gazing at the stars, I look through heaven’s wrinkle; the light I see now represents their past, having traveled many years across space to reach my eyes here on earth; the light they are emitting now will be visible only in some future, years away.
I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars, held together by gravity, the invisible glue that defines our universe, and bound elementally by a common material: stardust. This atomic grit of interstellar space paints dark clouds on the Milky Way, condenses itself into swirls of gravity-bound suns and planets, and provides the minerals bonded by the push and pull of electrical charges into the molecules that form our cells. Like stardust and the other materials of life itself, we are in constant motion, changing shape as we pass through our lives, and after the makings of our bodies break down and are recycled, rearranged into other forms of life.
The stars remind me of where I come from and who I am.
Susan J. Tweit, Walking Nature Home
We awakened to gray skies yesterday, to rain reveling in its own refrain and beating a staccato rhythm on the roof that shunned meter and metronome. Puckish breezes cavorted in the eaves and ruffled tiny leaves in the garden like tangy decks of playing cards. A thousand and one little waterfalls appeared out of nowhere, and impromptu streams danced their way through village gutters carrying twigs, oak leaves, pine needles and catkins.
Here and there were precious islands of stillness. Sheltered by overhanging trees, the ornamental pond in a friend's garden was like glass, its little school of white and scarlet koi hovering almost motionless in the early light, their open mouths like tiny perfect "o"s. Sometimes, they seemed to be swimming in light.
On our morning walk, we (Beau and I) took note of a rusty puddle under the corroded wheelbarrow in a neighbor's driveway, and I remembered that humans have been using rust (iron oxides) in artistic undertakings as far back as the prehistoric caves of Lascaux. I would be a happy camper indeed if I ever managed to produce something a scrap as vibrant as the magnificent Chinese horse.
I also remembered that a heady brew of iron oxides, carbon dioxide and water is probably where all sentient life began. The Japanese word for rust is sabi and together with wabi, another Japanese word meaning fresh or simple, it forms the expression wabi-sabi, an enfolding aesthetic or worldview centered on notions of transience, simplicity and naturalness or imperfection. Rust is fine stuff, be it in aesthetics, Asian philosophy, cave art, wet driveways or old wheelbarrows.
Clouds and rain, then sunshine and blue sky, then back to clouds and rain again, who knows what mid-May days will hold? When good weather prevails, Beau and I go into the woods, and we lurch along for an hour or two, a long way from the miles of rugged terrain we were once able to cover, but there is gratitude in every step.
On wet days, we listen to a little Bach or Rameau on the sound system, read and drink tea. We watch raindrops dappling the windows, the painterly way in which trees, rooflines and old wood fences are beaded with moisture and shining in the grey. Each and every raindrop is a minuscule world teeming with exuberant life, whole universes looking up at us, great and bumbling creatures that we are. Rain or shine, up and down, in and out, them and us, it's all good.
When I am wise in the speech of grass,I forget the sound of wordsand walk into the bottomlandand lie with my head on the groundand listen to what grass tells meabout small places for wind to sing,about the labor of insects,about shadows dank with spice,and the friendliness of weeds.
When I am wise in the dance of grass,I forget the name and runinto the rippling bottomlandand lean against the silence which flowsout of the crumpled mountainsand rises through slick blades, pods,wheat stems, and curly shoots,and is carried by wind for milesfrom my outstretched hands.
Mary Gray from Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World
One day there are no leaves or flowers on village trees, and the next day the same trees have embraced the season, their voluptuous canopies alive with birds who dish out madrigals at sunrise and trip the light fantastic from branch to branch until the sun goes down. Their pleasure is obvious, and oh, the fragrance, the splendid pinks!
Crabapple trees, magnolias, flowering almonds and plums seem to leaf out and flower overnight, and wonder of wonders, they are alive with madly buzzing bumbles, honey bees and wasps. Dusted with pollen from stem to stern, the little dears are in constant motion, ecstatic to feel sunlight on their wings and forage for nectar on a balmy morning in May.
Here comes another fine summer of prowling about in gardens wild and domestic with camera and lens, drinking in light and gathering nectars of my own. Now and then, I will put down my stuff and dance with the joyous bumble girls. Ungainly creature that I am, I hope no one is watching, but the bee sisters won't mind.
We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gifts and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Sunlight, blue skies and fluffy clouds overhead, birdsong in the overstory, avian courtship rites and nest building everywhere - the village is opening out and greening up before our eyes as Beau and I ramble about and peer into hedgerows.
Spring does not make a quiet entrance this far north - she comes over the hill with an exuberant bound, reaches out with a twiggy hand, and everything bursts into bloom. When we went off to the park a few mornings ago, the first narcissus of the season were blooming in a sheltered, sunny alcove, and we both did a little dance. These were the Poet's daffodil (Narcissus poeticus), often identified as the narcissus of ancient times and one of my favorite spring bloomers.
How can this week's word be anything except bloom? The modern word comes to us through the Middle English blo or blome, and Old English blowan meaning to open up and flower lavishly, to glow with health and well-being, to be as dewy and flushed with sunlight as a garden tulip or an early blooming orchid in a wild and wooded place. It all begins with the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots bhel-, bhol-, bhlē- bhlō-. In that ancient tongue which is the reconstructed common ancestor of all modern European languages, they mean to grow, swell or unfold, to leaf out or come into flower, to flourish and thrive.
Perhaps a better word for this week would be sex, because that is what springtime's lush colors, alluring fragrances, velvet textures and warbling ballads are about - Mother Earth's madcap dance of exuberance, fertility and fruitfulness. Every species on the planet seems focused on perpetuating its own heady genetic brew, and the collective pleasure in being alive is almost tangible.
Forsaking appointed chores, we potter around in the garden, wander about in village thickets, stare into trees and contemplate the blue sky for long intervals. It's simply a matter of blooming wherever one happens to be planted. Beau is already a master of that splendid art, and his silly old mum is working on it.
The rising hills,
the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together,
learn the flowers,
go light.
Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island
